1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to universal resource locator links, and more particularly, to methods and apparatuses for generating universal resource locator links through a computer graphical user interface linking editor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to the increased popularity of the internet (also known as the world wide web), using the internet has nearly become a necessity for many segments of the population. Accordingly, developers of internet computer software have been racing to make their products less complicated and easier to use. By way of example, many new internet products implement easy-to-use graphical user interfaces that simplify a user's task of navigating around networks like the world wide web and local area networks (LANs). In response to the internet's increased popularity, a larger number of individuals and businesses now have "web sites" posted on internet servers. As is well known in the art, internet servers are large scale computers connected to the world wide web and regularly maintained by service providers.
While establishing an internet presence for many businesses was important, most business typically contracted with experts to create their web sites and maintain them. Experts were generally used because most internet users did not understand, nor had the time to learn HTML programming. As is well known, HTML is a programming language that is generally used to create web sites that have text, graphics and pictures. Thus, to program in HTML, a person would need to understand numerous special codes and characters used for illustrating text, graphics, tables, pictures, and links within a web site file.
To meet consumer demand, many software developers introduced software packages that allowed people having little or no knowledge of HTML programming to create web sites. These packages generally implement graphical user interfaces that allowed users to type in text, create graphics and create links without generating the HTML code from scratch. Therefore, these packages implement software algorithms for converting the graphical user interface commands into appropriate HTML code. Of course, the HTML code was still being generated by the software algorithms without the knowledge of the user.
FIG. 1 is an exemplary block diagram of a web site having a number of related files that make up a web site. As shown, there is a "Home Web Site Page" which may be the initial page in a web site. Further, as is well known in the art, the various HTML files may be linked to one another through the use of universal resource locator (URL) links. In addition to linking to a particular file in general, users may also link to selected portions of an HTML file by linking to an "anchor," that was previously defined within the HTML file. By way of example, file2.html, file3.html and file6.html all have previously defined anchors that may be used by any of the web site files (or internet files) to quickly reference specific parts of an HTML file containing anchors. In this example, file1.html is shown being linked to anchors A, B, C and D, and all other files in the web site are shown linked back to file1.html, which is the Home Web Site Page.
Although having links between files and anchors is an efficient way to interconnect web site files and anchors, most well known web site creating packages make generating links laborious and clumsy. By way of example, each time a link is needed, users are generally required to call up a modal dialog from a menu bar (e.g., typically includes a list of functional pull-down menus) which subsequently displays to user a multiplicity of selection options. In some cases, the selection options are so complex that a user is required to perform numerous mechanical mouse clicks before a single link is created. As can be appreciated, the task of creating links for an entire web site can be very time consuming and confusing. In addition, due to the nature of modal dialogs, the user is generally required to complete the entire link configuration before the user is allowed to continue working on the web site files.
Another time consuming task is the typing in of URL's. As is well known to those skilled in web site building, many of the URL's used during the creation of a web site are quite long. In some cases, URL's may be a paragraph long. Certainly, the task of constantly re-typing the same URL for different locations of a file, or to link a web site's files together can be a very daunting and time consuming task. As an example, FIG. 1 shows all of the files in the web site having a link (i.e., Go Home) that takes a user that is navigating in each in the web site files back to the Home Web Site Page. Consequently, the web site creator is generally required to create a link at the bottom of each file using a conventional modal dialog, which unfortunately requires the user to constantly call up the modal dialog from the menu bar and re-type the identical URL.
In view of the foregoing, there is a needed for improved methods and apparatuses for generating universal resource locator links through a computer graphical user interface.